Fill Your Boots

By Peter Huryk

Pete Huryk explores several of the issues that are faced by high school age soccer players on and off the field. Fill Your Boots is filled with advice and personal stories acquired over thirty years as a player, coach, and teacher. Fill Your Boots is intended to help young players get past fear and doubt in order to reach their true potential.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781312208490

Book preview

Fill Your Boots

Fill

Your

Boots

By

Peter Huryk

Fill Your Boots

Imagine for a second that when you were born, a collection of soccer boots was brought into the world with you.  The collection contained all of the sizes that you would wear through the progression of your life.  The first pair would be small and the sizes would increase incrementally until your final pair.  If this collection existed, you could put your final pair on as a six year old and see how much space you had left to fill and how much you would grow.

Obviously, this is an imaginary exercise but it is a starting point. Although the image is of boots relative to the size of your feet, I’d like to expand the picture to your life.   You are not in your first pair of boots, neither are you in your final pair.  You are not in the first years of your life, nor are you in the last.  So you are still in the process of filling up your life.  This is a personal process that depends very heavily on your preferences and perspectives, the same as selecting the right boots.  The major difference is that you are not selecting your life off of a shelf or from a catalog; you are creating it as you go with some help from others.  My hope is that in this book you will find some little bits of help.

The book is broken almost directly in half.  One half deals with life and the other deals with soccer.  There is a lot of overlap between the two because soccer is a great teacher of life lessons.  As a player, I was able to extract a good amount from the game and I’ve taken more as a coach and a parent.  My hope is that some of what I have written can help you as you progress through this stage of your life.

Juggling

Juggling is another great metaphor for life because it reflects how life often feels. You have at least three things in the air at once, and in an attempt to keep all things from crashing to the ground, you spend just enough time on each to get it back up in the air.  Pick whatever parts of life you want: school, girlfriend, parents, etc.  Maintaining a balance between all of these things can be extremely difficult.

Soccer juggling is great because by dealing with only one thing there is only one focus.  It is a skill that takes practice.  At times it seems effortless, but the juggler knows that the appearance of ease is only a façade.  It is or was hard work to make things look that easy.  It is only through practice and learning what works and what doesn’t that anyone can make anything look easy.

As you read through the different parts of this book it may be helpful to remember the juggling metaphor.  The only way that things look easy is through experience and a lot of practice.  Very few things come easily or immediately.

Why?

Why?  It is my favorite question word.  It asks for the meaning behind things.  Life is not just a random series of events that happen to us.  There are reasons for why things happen.  Sometimes these reasons are obvious and sometimes they are not so apparent.  But, they are frequently by our own design.

So the question Why? is where I will start.  Why am I writing this book, and ultimately, why are you reading it?

There are several reasons, but when it is all broken down it comes down to two words: regret and hope.  No matter how great someone’s life is, they are bound to have a few regrets along the way.  Things left undone or mistakes made.  I don’t have a stockpile, but I have enough to look back on and wish for second chances at certain periods of my life.  As I’ve traveled through my life, I’ve picked up nuggets of knowledge that would have served me well earlier in life.  Since I can’t go back and do things over again, my hope is that some of the things that I’ve learned will help you along your journey.  Please scrutinize what I say and make sure that it works for you and your situation.  As a teacher and a father, nothing gives me greater satisfaction than helping young people avoid the pitfalls that I have endured.

Feel free to jump around this book.  Although it could be read cover to cover, you can jump to whatever section is important at the moment and come back to others later.  From my own experience, I have felt trapped into reading irrelevant material in order to get to what I really needed or wanted.  Each chapter should be broken down into small enough parts to allow you to get what you need when you need it.  I am viewing it more as an owner’s manual than anything else. It is something that I wish that I had in my high school years.

It will not be able to completely shield you from heartbreak or challenges, but it may lead you to better challenges or resolutions.  Despite the fact that I am writing this book to help, I also hope that you do have heartbreaks and challenges.  They add excitement to life and teach you valuable lessons.

Focus Determines Your Reality

Focus is one of the most important things for you to master.  It determines your reality.  This is a pretty big statement, but it is true.  Your focus is completely within your control.  If you focus on all the bad things that happen in your life, then that’s your reality.  If you focus on all of the good things that happen, then that’s your reality.  There are few things in life that are completely black and white.  Every situation carries with it a certain amount of interpretation and it is up to you to do that interpretation.

This is not an invitation to spray sunshine onto every single thing that happens in your life.  That’s not real and it’s also not realistic.  However, I would suggest that you spend more of your time focused on the positive things in your life.  Let me suggest an exercise that has changed my life in a positive way.

Take a notebook and for one week, every morning write out all of the things that are great in your life, that you are appreciative of, and that you’re thankful for. This may seem difficult at first, but if you take the exercise seriously and actually think of all of the positive things in your life, you’ll see a shift happen.  You’ll notice that the negative situations take less of a toll or are no longer noticeable. The things that you focus on, you’ll get more of.

Breaking the Cocoon

I am sure that at one point or another you’ve been told a story that in one way or another illustrates the lifecycle of a butterfly.  I’ve read several to my own children.  These stories tend to highlight the caterpillar and the butterfly.  In many ways, I think that the authors have glazed over the most important parts: the cocoon and the breaking of